So, I had some plans for this write-up to approach Citizen Kane with the idea that, despite the reputation Kane enjoys as the greatest film ever made, I don’t know of anyone who considers it a favorite. I’ll be the first to admit Kane is a truly impressive film, especially for its time, but I don’t know of anyone who considers it a personal favorite. But then something happened: I reread my original article on Citizen Kane when I did the AFI Challenge for Gabbing Geek, and I saw something I mentioned at the bottom of the article, namely that Citizen Kane is a favorite film for a very famous person: Donald Trump. As I recall off the top of my head, Trump had been interviewed for a proposed documentary, one that never went very far, where famous people were asked to discuss their favorite films, and Trump was either the only participant or one of the few, and he decided to talk up Citizen Kane as his favorite film. Regardless, Trump’s interview is out there for all to see if they know where to look. Granted, film critics and the like seemed to see Trump’s appreciation for Kane as an inaccurate interpretation of the film, one where Kane‘s lessons were lost on Trump, but it does lead me to a direction for Kane that I hadn’t been planning before.
And I promise I will not be getting any more political on this one than I have to.
So, before I go too much further, here as I can recall is how Donald Trump interpreted Citizen Kane: he thought it was a great look at a man who had it all, a man who could buy anything he wanted, and the one piece of advice Trump would give to the fictional Charles Foster Kane (played so well by Orson Welles in his film debut while directing and co-writing the script) was to get another woman. Now, I haven’t seen all of Trump’s commentary on Citizen Kane, but the general vibe that the film gives off is pretty much the opposite. Kane is a miserable man who, yes, can buy anything he wants, but there are limits to what money can buy, something that comes up again and again as the film progresses. However, it’s also been noted that Trump himself has a number of Kane-ish qualities. When Kane writes the “declaration of principals” for his newspapers, for example, he promises to tell the truth and all, but he also promises to deliver the news in an “entertaining” way. Arguably, the news needn’t be entertaining, but there are a number of people in politics and the media, Trump included, who behave as if it should. Likewise, Kane’s lavish home in Florida, his habit of collecting things, multiple marriages, and political ambitions all could remind a modern viewer of Donald Trump, but that is about as far as I want to take the comparison. Suffice to say that, for Mr. Trump, I suspect that when he saw Citizen Kane, he saw a man living a life much like his own and greatly approved, so why shouldn’t Trump see the film the way he does?
And, to be fair to Mr. Trump, he is hardly the first nor will he be the last to somewhat miss the point of a great film. Take, for example, all the men who thought the point of Fight Club was to go start a fight club. There’s a story I have heard where Fight Club director David Fincher’s then-13 year old daughter told her father about her new friend Max who said Fight Club was his favorite movie, to which Fincher told his daughter not to be friends with Max anymore. Likewise, I have heard numerous students over my career talk about how funny and awesome The Wolf of Wall Street was while missing the point that the film is an indictment on that sort of get-rich-quick scheming. And, as always, I remember all the guys I went to high school with who wanted to be in the mafia because of The Godfather. I’m sure there are examples of people misinterpreting film that are women or at least not young men, but all the examples I know of off the top of my head are. Heck, I’ll even include myself for a second when I point out that for years I thought one of my all-time favorite films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, had a happy ending. These days, well, I’m not so sure.
Part of this phenomena, and why it might be mostly young men I think of who experience this, is what I once heard a YouTube video essay call the “film bro” sort of film. Essentially, that’s the often R-rated, generally socially transgressive sort of film that a young man sees for the first time and finds it somehow is something of a revelation. The films themselves are often excellent, but the reason young men (and presumably young women in some cases) love these sorts of films is because they are transgressive in a way that a young man (and, again, presumably a young woman) might find “cool.” As the film bro matures, the “bro” part gets dropped and the film bro can appreciate and even enjoy the film for what it is beyond “edgy” and “cool.” I’m even reminded how, on my old podcast, my podcast partner Jen advised me not to tell women I met for the first time that I rank A Clockwork Orange among my all-time top ten favorites because of the film’s subject matter. She knew that I didn’t see that film’s protagonist as a role model or anything, but she likewise knew that someone who doesn’t know me as well wouldn’t realize that and a woman seeing it based on my own recommendations would probably be more disturbed than I was when I saw it the first time because, well, it is a disturbing film and it’s supposed to be on multiple levels, but that could describe most of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography.
However, Citizen Kane at first blush is an unconventional choice for a “film bro” sort of film. Some old black-and-white thing about a rich guy with his own media empire? On second thought, though, it fits very well. Charles Foster Kane has a lot of power, he can buy (almost) everything he wants, and he even goes on a late film rampage to destroy a room after second wife Susan (Dorothy Comingore) leaves him, one that may have been Welles himself going on a rampage and just deciding to leave it in the film anyway. If Kane wants to get the best newspaper in the country, he can buy out the top reporters of his biggest rival. If Kane wants to go on a sudden excursion to the Amazon Jungle for a picnic, he can. If he wants to make his second wife an opera star…well, he can try, that’s for sure.
The opera scenes, for me, demonstrate the limits to what wealth can buy. Susan wants to sing, so Kane makes her an opera star, complete with a touring show, leading roles, the best coaches money can buy, and Kane’s own newspapers touting her as the greatest opera singer the world has ever seen. The one thing Kane can’t buy is actual talent. I don’t quite hear what’s wrong with Susan’s voice myself, but the film makes it clear she’s not that good. Susan herself knows this. She sings leads not for herself but for Kane’s ego since it was embarrass him more to stop the tour than it would embarrass her to keep going on. Or, more accurately, Kane cares more for his embarrassment than hers. Likewise, Kane’s money can’t buy him anything like real friends or the ability to show genuine empathy or sympathy for others. He’s a cold fish of a man, one given to blasts of temper but nothing that really endears him too much to others. There are moments early on when Kane could come across as something like a decent human being, but the longer the film goes on, the less likely that is. The message, more than anything, is that money can’t buy someone happiness. Kane wants others to love him. He doesn’t seem to know how to love back.
That shouldn’t be too surprising given his childhood when his mother decides, after she finds herself rich from an unexpected gold deposit, to have her only son be raised by a rich banker instead of his poor biological parents. Kane’s father objects, even making a note about corporal punishment, but apparently he has no legal right here to stop his wife from letting a heartless banker adopt their only son. Now, the film may suggest Kane’s father was physically abusive depending on how you read the scene, and quite frankly, his mother is awfully cold about the whole thing, but would Kane have been better off if his parents had raised him? Possibly, but it’s the sort of “what if” that can’t really be answered. I think the idea should be that loving parents can do a better job raising a child than unlimited money, and even when Kane is at his best, he can still be a bit of a brat to his banker guardian. Kane’s childhood may have taught him that money mattered more than love, and that would reflect a man who never quite got it otherwise. Kane, at the end of his life, was surrounded by employees, not loved ones. Why wouldn’t he make a reference to the childhood sled he was playing with just before he went away with the banker? He looked genuinely happy in that scene, playing on a snowy field that could just as easily be the one inside that snow globe he drops at the start of the film.
So, really, Kane is a lonely man who could buy all just of physical objects, but his stately pleasure palace Xanadu has a “no trespassing” sign on the fence that appears at the very beginning and end of the film, one that drives home a different message at the end than it did in the beginning. Initially, it would be a message designed to discuss Kane’s home. At the end, it’s a fitting message about getting close to Kane’s heart. Charles Foster Kane is not a role model. He’s a warning.
Amazing to think this was Welles’s first film, too. He may have never equaled Citizen Kane, but if you have to hit your cinematic peak with your first feature at the age of 25 or so, you might as well hit it with a contender for the greatest film ever made.
NEXT: If Citizen Kane shows something of a cinematic genius knocking it out of the park with a first film before he even turned 30, up next shows another fellow who was about 30 when he made the next entry in the Stacker Challenge, his second feature, and proved the first was no fluke. Be back soon when I revisit Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 crime drama Pulp Fiction.
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